Promotional materials for videos are helpful in informing a potential audience about the content of the videos. For instance, video trailers, still-image posters, and the like may be helpful in letting users know about the theme or plot of a movie, television show, or other type of video. In order to create quality promotional materials, it is often useful to analyze the content of a particular video to determine the plot, key character roles within the video, and the like. With this information, the creator of the promotional material is able to create the trailer, poster, or other type of content in a way that adequately portrays the contents of the video.
Conventional approaches to movie content analysis depend on metadata provided by cast lists, scripts, and/or crowd-sourcing knowledge from the web without regard to correlations among roles. For instance, these traditional techniques may identify main characters from a video by manually identifying the characters and using metadata (e.g., cast lists, scripts, and/or crowd-sourcing knowledge from the web) associated with the movies. Some attempts have been made to associate names with the corresponding roles in news videos based on co-occurrence, as well as using face appearance, clothes appearance, speaking status, scripts, and image search results. One approach attempts to match an affinity network of faces and a second affinity network of names in order to assign a name to each face. However, such an approach has limited applicability for generating promotional posters since the matching merely matches faces to names.
While these traditional techniques may work in instances where the analyzed video includes rich metadata, such conventional approaches are not practical when little metadata is available, which may be true for internet protocol television (IPTV) and video on demand (VOD) systems. In contrast to metadata-rich videos, these videos often only include a brief title of each video section. In addition, the current process of creating promotional posters is time intensive and expensive because the current process requires the skills of graphics artists and designers. Promotional posters are characterized by: (1) having a conspicuous main theme and object; (2) grabbing attention through the use of colors and textures; (3) being self-contained and self-explained; and (4) being specially designed for viewing from a distance. Accordingly, as the amount of movies and other videos increase, manual techniques become difficult to effectively administer. In addition, not all of these movies and videos will have a sufficient amount of metadata available for analysis to create a high-quality poster or other types of promotional content.